Résumés are a primary communication medium between employers and job applicants (candidates). Employers annually spend billions of dollars to solicit résumés using newspaper advertisements, job fairs, college recruitment seminars, and other methods. In response, job applicants spend billions more to compose, typeset, print, and ship those résumés.
Unfortunately, present résumé delivery practices are expensive and frustrating for job applicants. Identifying potential employers, obtaining addresses, producing résumés for each, and finally delivering them is burdensome and time-consuming. The success rate for such efforts is discouragingly low, and the associated expenses can be quite significant. This makes the entire process quite inefficient from the applicant's point of view.
Employers, too, suffer from the inefficiencies of résumé collection and handling. The solicitation, receipt, storage, management, search, and retrieval of dozens, hundreds, and in some cases thousands of résumés can be a difficult, unwieldy, and expensive burden on the employer. Physical, paper-based résumés are often stored in desk drawers and filing cabinets. The numerous limitations of present résumé practices include consumption of substantial physical space; difficulty in searching through large quantities of paper documents; the near-impossibility of correlating applicants whose résumés may vary widely in organization, content, and clarity; and the lack of uniformity in the search process from one practitioner to another.
From the above discussion, it is clear that a very significant need exists for an improved method of résumésolicitation, sorting, delivery, handling, and management. Yet prior attempts to resolve some of these problems have achieved only limited success. Document scanners have been used in some attempts to reduce the physical space consumed by physical résumés. However, search methods do not work well on scanned images because scanned résumés are stored as pictures, not searchable words or text.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been used in some attempts to convert paper-based résumés to pure text. However, employers are typically unwilling to forgo the traditional résumé because of the widely held belief that the ability to review the format, style, and presentation of the résumé itself is of value.
Still other attempts have employed the aforementioned OCR conversion to allow the use of “keyword” search methods on the resulting text of full résumés, in an attempt to find those which contain key words or phrases. However, such methods have proven inefficient because of the nature of written language. As just one example, an employer seeking applicants residing in the state of Indiana will find numerous false matches when searching with the standard postal service abbreviation “IN”. The letter pair “in” appears frequently in the English language (many times in this sentence alone), yet most such matches in the full text of a résumé would have little or nothing to do with the searcher's true intent.
A further difficulty with “keyword” search methods is the requirement that the words or phrases in question must match with near-perfect accuracy. The diversity of job applicant writing skills and vocabularies causes many résumés, which otherwise might describe applicants with similar attributes, to be written using very different terms and phrases. Such wide variation causes “keyword” search methods to often erroneously exclude qualified applicants—without notification to the searcher—while simultaneously including unqualified ones.
Prior attempts at applying computer technology to résumé management have been limited in scope, applicability, and usefulness. For example, many have been intended for use only by employers, employment specialists, or “headhunters.” Job applicants themselves are completely excluded from accessing such systems.
One prior attempt, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,164,897 to Clark et al. (incorporated by reference), is illustrative. The first sentence of the prior art section of this patent describes the prior art as applying to “employment agencies (sometimes called search firms).” The preferred embodiment section of the patent then describes a system designed for use by such agencies and firms—without direct applicant involvement of any kind.
Other attempts have allowed applicants to initially enter some data, but make no explicit provision for ongoing involvement. Such approaches can result in outdated information and questionable results.
Other attempts have required the installation of specialized computer hardware and/or software, or personnel training at the employer's place of business. The difficulty in learning and using the system often effectively restricts access to just those who have been appropriately “trained.”
Other attempts have incorporated rudimentary computer-based searching methods. The most common method involves the aforementioned “keyword” searches on the contents of entire résumés, such as offered by Online Career Center, Indianapolis, Ind. and TMP Interactive, Framingham, Mass. The inherent limitations of such methods have already been discussed.
Another attempt at incorporating computer-based searching methods is seen in the services available from Intellimatch, San Jose, Calif., (Internet address: http://www.intellimatch.com). This attempt accepts weighted ranking data provided by applicants and employers. There are several disadvantages of this type of method: First, the user interface for interacting with such ranking systems can be complex, non-intuitive, unfamiliar, difficult to learn, and slow to operate. Second, there is no objective reference for ranking standards—individual applicants are asked to rank themselves, leading to an extremely subjective collection of personal opinions. Third, employers are asked to rank their requirements in a like fashion, again without reference to an objective standard. Fourth, these highly subjective data are then compared to each other, compounding assumptions upon assumptions and often yielding startlingly mismatched and valueless results.
Another attempt at providing résuméservices on the Internet is provided by Beverly Hills Software, 469 South Bedford Drive, Beverly Hills, Calif. 90212, (Internet address: http://www.Bhs.Com). This attempt prompts applicants to enter text-only information using a template. However, keyword searches still involve searching the entire contents of résumé data; no searching by fields is available. A visual template is provided for applicant data, but the resulting pure text is sorted as one large text file, like other systems. There is also no provision for charging or collecting fees.
Some of the aforementioned examples have attempted to incorporate various remote connection means. Such remote methods have traditionally been limited to text-only résuméstorage and keyword-based searches of the full résumé text. None have succeeded in addressing all of the problems described above.